When I wrote in September about Sebastian Barry's Secret Scripture, several people commented that I should read this one. Why? because the themes are similar. I already knew about Esme Lennox, but I'd tried Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone and not got on very well with it, so had held off. Anyway, this finally came my way and I started it -- and finished it -- yesterday. Yes, it was unputdownable. And yes, it does have a relationship to the Barry novel. Both of their plots revolve around a woman who has been incarcerated in a mental hospital at a very young age and has remained there for over sixty years. In both cases this was completely unjustly done. In both novels, the hospital is closing down and the inhabitants have to be rehoused. But there, really the similarity ends. The two novels are narrated in a very different way. While Barry's story is told through the diary entries of the protagonist and her physician, O'Farrell's narrative is much more wide-ranging and complex, giving us glimpses into the past through various perspectives and also telling the story of the novel's present, in which a young woman, Iris Lockhart, finds herself saddled with a great-aunt she never knew existed. Although the reader learns early on of Esme's hospitalisation all those years ago, the facts that lie behind it are revealed only gradually. And chilling facts they are. Esme, intelligent, strong-willed, rebellious, and increasingly attractive, has never been understood by her conventional family. Persecuted at school for her strangeness, and damaged by some traumatic events in her childhood, she is disposed of by her parents with what really appears to be relief when a horrific ordeal temporarily unbalances her. When Iris, much to her discomfort, is forced to bring Esme to her flat, she is dreading the experience. But Esme is not the terrifying madwoman that Iris has been dreading. Esme does, however, have secrets of her own, and secrets to discover. As more and more of her past is revealed, and as her older sister's role in the long-ago events becomes clearer, the tension mounts. I was not, however, prepared for the climax and finished the book feeling quite shaken. This is a beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking novel. Iris's own story --complex and troubled in itself -- interweaves with Esme's and the reader begins to see similarities between the two women. But above all this is Esme's story, and it evokes tremendous sympathy for this interesting, unhappy woman. Highly recommended.
